Superman on U.S. Stamp

This weekend, the latest version of the Superman story was released in theaters. Superman is one of the oldest and most beloved heroes of American comics and has seen numerous incarnations on TV and the big screen.

The U.S. Postal service in 2006 published a sheet of 39-cent stamps and 24-cent postal cards using characters of DC Comics. The series came in a set of 20 stamps on the sheet – half showing the individual superheroes and other half showing covers of comic books starring them. Superman was the first stamp in that series.

The first Superman character created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster was not a hero, but rather a villain. Their short story “The Reign of the Super-Man” concerned a bald-headed villain, somewhat reminiscent of Flash Gordon’s Ming the Merciless, bent on dominating the world. The story did not sell very well.

They reworked the character into a hero and were able to sell it to a new upstart company at the time, DC Comics, who took a chance on the story. The revised Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 in 1938 and it was a smashing success. By the time the United States had entered World War II, Superman had inspired a boom in the comic book industry and had engendered the new genre of the “superheroes.”